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Russ: This is a BusinessMakers WebXtra, a continuation of Erica O'Grady's visit to the Bay Area last week where she sits down with three guests featured in Shell Israel's Twitterville.
Erica: Hi. This is Erica O'Grady and I'm on the road with the BusinessMakers and today I'm here with Yanis Croons who is actually featured in Shell Israel's new book, Twitterville. Yanis, I'd love to hear your story. Welcome to the show.
Yanis: Well thanks for having me and I'm in the book because I took the infamous picture of the miracle on the Hudson. I happened to be in New York for a couple of meetings and my car was parked in New Jersey. I was actually the last person to run up on the ferry like in the movies where you're yelling for the ferry to wait for you. So I run up to the ferry, I get on my phone, and we're pulling out of the station, make the turn, and someone yells, "There's a plane in front of us." Obviously I'm thinking it's a Cessna, some kind of a smaller plane. Everyone looks up and it's this huge Boeing in front of us. We were pulling up to one of the wings and I proceeded to take a picture and then I actually Tweeted. After Tweeting it I gave my phone to one of the survivors we pulled up, and I didn't see my phone for the next 20 minutes or so. When we pulled up around 30 people, I got back to the port in Manhattan, I got my phone back and I had messages and calls from everyone, so I pick up the latest one and it's MSNBC and they said, "Can you be on air in 20 seconds?" and from then on the picture just spread like wildfire and it's now one of the examples of Shell's book because of the power of social media of citizens being able to show what's going on in real time.
Erica: This is actually a pretty big trend. Politicians worry about it and movie stars worry about it, but everybody now has some sort of a mobile device out there and they can take photo and they can take video and they can basically track your entire life if they're close enough. When you took that picture did you have any idea that the next thing you knew you were gonna get a call from MSNBC asking you to be on air?
Yanis: No idea. First off I wasn't the only one taking pictures, but I guess I was the only one who Twittered it, and my followers at that point, I think I had maybe 170 or something like that, so I didn't have a large following base. I didn't email it to CNN or anything like that, so I just thought it was a crazy site and I Tweeted it and I took the picture just for my records because I thought it'd be good to have. So I shared it with my followers, but once it became on the public stream that's when it got re-Tweeted over and over, so initially no idea.
Erica: How many of your followers actually re-Tweeted the picture and how long was it before that picture actually went out to Twitter before you started getting messages and phone calls?
Yanis: I took it I think 15 minutes after the crash. We were the first ferry to the plane, so I don't know the exact time, but a couple of my bigger followers, they re-Tweeted it. I think the main one was the Silicon Allay insider, they got it pretty quickly. They printed it out to their network and within I think 20 minutes MSNBC had it on their website. Everyone started Googling or Twittering "Miracle on the Hudson" or "Crash on the Hudson" and that was one of the things that came up.
Erica: Do you have any idea how many times that photo was re-tweeted?
Yanis: Re-tweeted I don't know, but it's been viewed almost 500,000 times. It was on the L.A. Times cover, it was on San Antonio, Charlotte, Orlando Sentinel, so it's been all over the world. I mean I got calls from Australia an hour later for interviews. It went around the world instantaneously.
Erica: So has this helped your business?
Yanis: I have more of a presence so when I promote something I have a better audience.
Erica: You're almost a micro-celebrity and it's kind of a one-off micro-celebrity, but you can walk into a room and you instantly have a little bit of credence ‘cause, "Oh, you're the guy that took the photo of the plane on the Hudson."
Yanis: I have a great story. Yeah. [Laughing]
Erica: And stories are really what make businesses work.
Yanis: Exactly.
Erica: Well Yanis, I want to thank you for being here. I appreciate it.
Yanis: Thanks for having me.
Erica: So I'm here now with Stacey Monk who's also been featured in Shel Israel's new book, Twitterville. So Stacey, welcome to the show.
Stacey: Thanks!
Erica: So tell me your story. Why are you featured in the new book?
Stacey: So I'm the founder of a start-up non-profit called Epic Change, and last year at Thanksgiving time we created a fundraiser called Tweetsgiving. What we did was we asked everyone on Twitter or as many people as we could get to, to tweet what they were grateful for, and if they were moved to they donated. What happened was enough people donated that we built a classroom in Arusha, Tanzania where the Twitter handles of the donors are painted on the walls.
Erica: So what kind of advice can you give to non-profits who are looking to leverage Twitter in social media to help increase donations or build wells or whatever it is that they're looking to do in the world to help change the world?
Stacey: Be creative and make it fun. I think a lot of people go out with the first call to action being "We need $10.00" or "We need $100.00." I think what really worked for us about Tweetsgiving was that we asked people to be grateful as our first point of entry, and that really allowed it to be less about raising the money than about transforming the way the universe felt about gratitude. I think that that's the difference for me. Don't just go and say, "Hey, we need money!" Figure out how to make it really interesting for people.
Erica: I have a lot of people who work with non-profits or run non-profits who say, "Oh, let's start a Twitter campaign and raise money" and I say, "Wait a minute. You've got to step back and one of the first things you need to do first is really build relationships. You have to set a solid foundation because you can't go out and ask people for something if they don't know who you are, even if your cause is wonderful, even if your story is wonderful. A lot of times that's not enough. So how do they actually build those relationships? What's your number one rule for building relationships with Twitter?
Stacey: Be authentic and be a person before you are about your cause. My first Twitter handle was Epic Change and I started it from an organizational perspective, and I found that wasn't very successful and then as soon as I renamed myself Stacey Monk and became Stacey Monk it was much more successful and I started acting like myself.
Erica: Fantastic. Well thank you so much, Stacey. I appreciate it.
Stacey: Thanks a lot, Erica.
Erica: I'm now here with Arie Ball who's also been featured in the new book, Twitterville. Welcome to the show, Arie.
Arie: Hi. Pleased to be here.
Erica: So tell me what is your story? I know this has something to do with recruiting, so tell us how did Twitter change your company's world?
Arie: I work for Sedexo and we're a very large global company hiring about 5,000 managers a year in the U.S. alone. We are always looking for new ways to be able to connect with potential candidates. When we started hearing about Twitter about a year and a half ago one of the folks on my team, she's our marketing communications manager and she works in our talent acquisition team, she looked into Twitter and tried it and kind of played around with it and we talked about it and determined this is something we wanted to try. So in November of 2008 we did a Tweet-up at a national meeting and share it with our team, all of our recruiters, about 100 team members, and in December we trained our team and started recruiting. We had at that time about 20 recruiters actively involved. Right now we have about 50 recruiters actively involved with tweeting. It's just fabulous ‘cause it helps us to connect with passive candidates as well as active. People learn about our company, get an insider view of what's going on. It also drives them to our blog, our career site, so it's just been fabulous for us in terms of lots of hires coming out of it. It's helped drive candidates to our career site. We're pretty proud of the fact that traffic to our career site over the last 15 months has tripled.
Erica: Wow. That's really impressive.
Arie: Yeah, so it's been great for us. It's helped to build a talent network that is now about 140,000 strong and it's helped us in terms of reducing costs.
Erica: What kind of advice would you give to those companies out there that say, "Well you know Twitter is not right for our business. Twitter is a waste of time. it's a time waster. We don't see any ROI on participating in that space"?
Arie: I think the best way for somebody to understand the value in it is to try it and try it slowly. Have a few recruiters try it. Build the right kind of followers for the field that you're trying to recruit for. Get involved in the conversation. I would tell them to not go blasting messages off to people but to start slowly and have conversations with candidates. Little by little learn and build a talent network that'll help you with your recruiting effort.
Erica: If you had to quantify the value that this has given to your company in such a short amount of time or with very little overhead, what would you say would be the value?
Arie: There's certainly the value of branding that we are a B to B company so we don't have that consumer brand recognition that some companies have definitely has helped us in that area. The other value as I mentioned earlier, it's helped us to build traffic to our website in black and white hard data that we've tripled our traffic through Twitter and other means, not just Twitter alone but other means. They're all connected, and it's helped us. We've saved a couple hundred thousand in advertising.
Erica: Companies should definitely take notice and they should at least give it a try and see if it's something that would be beneficial to their organization.
Arie: Yeah.
Erica: Well thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.
Russ: Okay. That wraps up this BusinessMakers WebXtra. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.